What is a disk usage analyzer?

A disk usage analyzer shows what takes up space on a drive or in a folder, so you know what to clean up. Linux desktops come with one, like Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab) on Debian and Ubuntu, and on Windows WinDirStat is a popular pick. Most of them draw a treemap: every folder is a box as big as the space its files take, with its subfolders and files as smaller boxes inside it. A 4 GB video next to a folder of small documents stands out at a glance, without opening folder after folder.

Tool description

This tool analyzes a folder on your computer in the browser. Click Browse folder and pick the folder, or drop it on the page. The treemap shows its subfolders as boxes with their name and size, and its files as tiles colored by type: media (photos, video and audio), archives (ZIP, TAR.GZ, ISO and other disk images, DEB and RPM packages), documents (PDF, office files, text and code) and everything else. Hover a tile to see its name, folder, size and share of the folder you're looking at. Click a box to zoom into that folder, and click a folder in the path above the treemap to go back up.

Under the treemap, the contents table lists the folders and files in the current folder, biggest first, with their size, share and number of files. Sort it by any column, click a folder to open it, or export the list as CSV or JSON.

Chrome and Edge ask whether to upload the files to the site when you pick a folder. That's their standard wording for any folder picker: the tool only reads the names and sizes of the files on your device, and nothing is uploaded.

Features

  • Treemap of any folder, with subfolders inside their folders and files colored by type
  • Zoom into a folder with a click and go back up from the path
  • Table of the biggest folders and files, sortable and exportable as CSV or JSON
  • Total size and the number of files and folders

How it works

The browser gives the tool every file in the picked folder with its path and size, hidden files and folders like .cache included. The tool adds up the sizes folder by folder and lays the boxes out as a squarified treemap, which keeps them close to squares so their sizes are easy to compare. Sizes are the lengths of the files, the apparent size that du -b reports. Baobab and plain du count the disk blocks the files take instead, so their numbers can differ: a bit higher for folders full of small files, lower for sparse files such as some virtual machine disks. Empty folders don't show up, since browsers only list files.

Tips

  • Folders with many files take a while. Chrome lists all the files before the tool gets them, then reads each file's size, which takes a few seconds per 10,000 files. A project folder is quick, a whole home folder can take a few minutes.
  • Pick the folder you want to clean up rather than the whole home folder, it's faster.
  • Phones and tablets usually can't pick folders, so use the tool on a computer.